To Build a House in Vancouver

In early 2009 we decided to jump in and build a house, as an Owner Builder, in the city of Vancouver. This is something that we had been thinking about undertaking for some time, so with the dip in the Vancouver Real Estate market in early 2009 we sold our old house a bought a Vancouver West Side Lot at what has proved to be (so far) a very good price. Fortunately this lot came with plans that had already been approved three years earlier.

We submitted our RS-5 (conditional) plans in May and at that time were told by the city planning department the process to get a development permit should take two months because the plans had already gone through the process. In the end it still took five months and we did not get any benefit from the fact the plans were essentially "perfect" right at the start of the process.

As a first time builder there were many things we learned along the way to getting our permit, especially how the "opinions" of those in a decision making capacity can have on a project. This includes both city staff and the various engineers and professionals that one needs to work with.

During this time we also did quite a bit of work on budgeting as we had heard of a fairly wide range in terms of costs per square foot. I have put together a very detailed excel spreadsheet for our project budget and will be updating it every week as real costs are concerned. Initially we were trying to keep costs under $16o per square foot but realistically at this point we believe we will end up somewhere around $190 to $210 per square foot. This is for a 2950 square foot "custom" build - it is not being built as a spec home which we could probably do for around $160 per square foot.